ECS USA is holding a competition for North American users to design mods for the LIVA mini PC kit. The contest consists of three phases and round one, whose winners will advance to the second phase, ends on September 30th. If you want to enter in the contest, you will need to submit your first phase entry before then to be eligible for the second phase. Check out Morry's post for a second opinion.

What are the phases?

Round 1 (Ends September 30th): You will need to publish the "soft copy" of your design draft to Facebook. This will consist of six illustrations: Front, Rear, Left Side, Right Side, Top, and 45-degree 3D illustration. See the image below for an example. The top ten participants, based on Facebook likes, will be provided with a white LIVA mini PC kit to modify in Round 2.

Round 2 (Ends October 31st): The winners of Round 1 will, using the provided LIVA kits and your design draft, implement their customizations. Photographs of these modified cases will be sent to ECS (I assume by Facebook) for a team of judges to rank them first, second, third, or runner-up.

Round 3 (November 7th): Sit back, relax, and wait for the judges to select winners. The Champion will receive $1000 USD for their trouble, second place will get $500 USD, and third will get $300 USD. The honorable mentions will get various swags.

The contest is open to residents of the USA and Canada. Do it fast! It's less than two weeks and, as I understand it, the later you enter, the less time you will have to accumulate Facebook likes.

When Google discusses using toilet water to cool a data centre, they don't exactly mean it in the way that this case mod went, but the latter is certainly easier to set up at home. Other such inventive cooling solutions have been tried, after all what good is it if the weather outside is -40o if you don't have it vented through to your PCs intake fan? However this is probably the first time someone popped a water pump into a toilet reservoir to use as an open cooling loop for a PC. With a slight change to the tubing, you could probably ensure you never have to sit down on a cold seat again. ExtremeTech has pictures of the system and its creator here.

"Hot on the heels of news that Google uses toilet water to cool one of its data centers, it has emerged that an enterprising hardware hacker had the same idea some seven years ago. As you will see in the following pictures, though, Jeff Gagnon’s computer is much more than a toilet-cooled rig — it’s a case mod tour de force."

Yes, I am still gaming away and getting destroyed in some StarCraft II but at least we are having fun. In between ass-whoopings I have been wandering around the BYOC looking for some interesting case mods. Here are a few I found interesting.

These aren't really mods but I like the idea of bringing a BYOC stand that puts the case and computing components over the display in use, saving space on the table and moving the heat closer to the ceiling.

Here is another example of the design but with a brightly lit overclocked and water cooled SLI configuration.

Probably my favorite for the event has been this Lego case that took about 2 years to create according to the owner. The crane on the left is fully workable and controllable via some software running on the system. My favorite part though: the HDD LED is routed to look like a Lego guy's welding light on the front!!

Finally, here is a random shot of some people lining up to play a game of "LAN Pong" involving tossing tennis balls into a bucket. The prizes were impressive though: a pair of NVIDIA Tegra 2 powered tablets.